The best marketing emails are personalized, automated, transactional: New Silverpop report

Silverpop has released findings from its 2014 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Report. When it comes to engaging customers via email, automated messages based on transactions outperform all others, according to the study by the marketing automation software maker.  

According to Silverpop's numbers, more people open and click through on more timely automated emails. The study found that automated messages achieved an open rate nearly 15 percent higher and click-through rate nearly 79 percent higher than their manual counterparts, on average. That improved engagement comes from the ability to tailor the message and the timing of its delivery, the report concludes.

That would appear to be good news for Dynamics CRM users who have made a point of making event-driven, dynamic email communication a component of their strategy, typically through integration to a marketing automation or email marketing solution.

The study also found that the best of the best in terms of email performance went to transactional emails - emails triggered in response to a purchase, account activity, or other behavior - and that the highest performing transactional emails had open rates four times better than median open rates for non-transactional messages.

Transactional messages (emails triggered automatically by behaviors like purchases or account activity) sent by companies with results in the top-quartile have open rates four times higher than median open rates for non-transactional messages

Transactional messages also achieved a median click-through rate of 4.2 percent and click-to-open rate of 15.1 percent, compared to nontransactional messages at 1.5 and 9.9 percent, respectively.

The report studied emails sent by nearly 3,000 brands across 40 countries throughout 2013.